Dozens of large fires were raging across the Northern Rockies in Idaho and Montana in mid-August 2007. This image of the area was captured on Sunday, August 12, at 2:55 p.m. U.S. Mountain Daylight Time by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Dozens of fires (marked in red) were billowing out clouds of gray-brown smoke that spread across both states. Fires appeared especially active in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness area south of the Salmon River.

According to the August 12 report from the National Interagency Fire Center, 31 large fires were burning more than 753,000 acres in the two states, and activity was predicted to increase in the coming days as sustained winds of 15-20 miles per hour were predicted to race across the Great Basin and Northern Rockies.

The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides twice-daily images of the region in additional resolutions.